Blosxom 3+4i

My weblog uses Rael Dornfest's Blosxom software — but not the stock version. I've customized it quite a bit. Rael gives his versions imaginary numbers, 0+xi in sequence, where x is a positive integer. To reflect my changes, I have been incrementing the real component: 3+4i is the third edition of my changes to Blosxom 0+4i.

I've not made these changes with any intent to fold them back into the upstream source. Just the opposite: I've rewritten large chunks to suit my own coding style, ditched features I don't want in the name of performance, and changed hardcoded behaviors that I don't like to hardcoded behaviors that I do.

Forthwith, a list of changes:

3+4i (10 Apr 2004)

Add support for per-entry timezone annotation.

2+4i (5 June 2002)

Speed this sucker up: in rough order of bang for buck

• Stat all the files once in a tight loop, then sort the results, rather than repeatedly stat-ing while sorting.
• Open and read the story template once, not once per entry.
• chdir into the data directory to make all the open and stat calls go faster.
• Slurp files by undef $/ rather than join '', <FH>.
• Rip out support for RSS and for multiple blogs.
• Do as many text transformations as early as possible, and only once.
• Do not use the FileHandle, DirHandle, Time::localtime, or File::stat modules. (These merely add overhead to Perl primitive operations. Admittedly the latter two did make the code somewhat easier to read, but the speed hit was not worth it.)
• Remove the default templates. You have to have head.html, foot.html, and story.html, or the script will barf.

Also, add more error checking. You can never have too much error checking.
Finally, remove the "first line of the file is a title" feature, which I don't use and don't want to have to remember to work around all the time.

1+4i (1 June 2002)

Customizations for my own personal blog style. These mostly affected date handling; I wanted as close a match to the old by-hand format as practical. (Twelve-hour clock with AM/PM annotation, times rounded to five minutes, no minutes at the top of the hour, that sort of thing.)

If you would like, you may download my version and use it yourself. Please remember to send bug reports to me, not Rael.